


Closure, Closer

by FiveTail



Category: Original Work, Surreality - Fandom
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 19:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3661890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FiveTail/pseuds/FiveTail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The girl with Christ on her tongue stands above the girl with a lighter in her pocket, resolve solid through the stare she gets along the way. Content warning for implications of rape / sexual abuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closure, Closer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sdfsdfsd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdfsdfsd/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Surreality](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/106992) by ashes. 



> I wrote this short story for a national competition, and unfortunately I didn't end up making the longlist! Special thanks to [Klone](http://thisworldendswithme.tumblr.com) for being my beta.
> 
> **Content warning for implications of rape / sexual abuse.**

Jackie Shaw shouldered the burden of her tragedy wherever she went. The disaster which destroyed her home also stole her father, and only relative, away from her. She would start over, they told her, in a state-assigned family near a state-assigned school attending state-assigned cognitive therapy, all which involved several fancy, expensive ways of telling her to move on. Her father’s ghost clung to her heels with every step down her middle-school hallway. Adults and peers reclaimed her crumbled foundation to raise her upon a pedestal of public pity, as a yardstick against which people would measure their blessings.

A boy waved a lighter in front of her face and asked if she was still afraid of fire.

She broke his nose and kept the lighter.

The first time Alice Reyes remembers being called beautiful, she was eight years old in a white dress, handcrafted embroidery and faux pearl tangled like vines down the front of her chest. Beaming gazes came from all around as her father slid her satin veil atop her head, the white tiara flowers crowning her virginal. Cameras followed her for the remainder of her first communion. She would drink the blood of Christ and taste his flesh and know what it meant to be pure.

The kids at school would laugh and tease; they would say that she was filthy, that God had missed spots trying to scrub her clean.

Mother said people who spoke with violence only did so because they were ugly on the inside. Alice thought that would be a more preferable kind of ugly, an ugly that doesn’t lead to nights alone in front of a mirror, with her mother’s wasted makeup and the outside it could not cover.

(The vitiligo did not cause the cruelty. Children will be cruel.)

Alice learned young that being unpopular isn’t as romantic as they make it seem on television. For instance, schools have too many students to afford single-patron cafeteria tables for the lonely--if you had to keep to yourself during lunchtime, back alleys and bathrooms were sanctuaries.

Halfway through her first month of high school, after routines settled and those doomed to obscurity were identified, Alice finds her spot behind the building occupied by a girl with a blonde undercut and fire in her eyes.

Alice’s hands shake at the prospect of confrontation, but she will not surrender her sanctuary.

The girl with Christ on her tongue stands above the girl with a lighter in her pocket, resolve solid through the stare she gets along the way.

“What do you want?” Jackie snaps.

Alice doesn’t respond.

“Do I know you?”

Alice shakes her head.

Jackie’s brow knits together in confusion. “Do you know who I am?”

Alice picks up the familiar subtlety in Jackie’s tone, the one carried by someone cursed with too many people knowing exactly who they were.

Alice’s gaze keeps steady where her voice does not. “You’re the girl in my lunch spot.”

“Oh,” she says, quietly. She scratches the side of her neck. “Can I stay?”

“With me?” Alice offers a smirk as sits on the ground next to Jackie. “Only if you don’t wanna have any friends.”

“Way ahead of you,” Jackie says, her laugh bitter on her tongue. “Wanna ‘not have any friends’ together?”

Pausing for a moment, Alice reaches into her lunchbag and pushes aside her sandwich, in favour of sharing the handful of cookies tucked away at the bottom.

Jackie shows too many teeth when she smiles.

Their friendship takes root in a mutual appreciation of their flaws, of what others had to treat as invisible in order to see them as human.

It doesn’t take long for Jackie’s reputation to catch up with her. Jackie is known to Alice’s mother as a problem child with a troubled past. Jackie is known to Alice as a dog person who hates cilantro.

“She wants you to start coming to church,” says Alice.

“If it’ll get her off your back,” agrees Jackie.

Sunday morning attendance, in Jackie’s eyes, is a small price to pay for the opportunity to sit next to Alice in the pews, to witness the sermon restoring faith to her heart.

It’s during a service when Jackie first sees Alice’s artwork on display: watercolour on canvas, a magnificent still life playing backdrop to the advertisement of an opportunity to work with at-risk children. Art was just a hobby she volunteered to the church, Alice explained; she could copy real life just fine, but she never enjoyed it because never saw herself in her work.

“Then you should try painting what you see in the mirror,” Jackie suggests, taking down the phone number on the back of her wrist.

Jackie begins spending her school volunteering hours with children who shouldered the burden of their tragedies, teaching them there’s more to life beyond their fires than simply moving on. There is little trace of God in her lessons, but the children see her as human just fine.

The night Alice tries painting herself is the night she realizes she was difficult to capture; she could copy what she saw in the mirror, but something was missing. Maybe it was the complexity of the unsightly blotches on her skin, Alice thought. Maybe God never intended for a face like hers to be captured on canvas.

Jackie's kiss is the brushstroke that completes Alice’s portrait.

Alice begins painting from memory. Jackie does not wear a cross.

The last time Alice remembers being called beautiful, it was by him.

Innocent teenage mischief with a fellow church member. Late-night trespass and too much to drink. A sequence of events out of her control. It was the story everyone’s heard before, she thought, as strong, drunken hands shoved her hard against the pews. Clumsy fingers forcefully hiked her dress up by the hem; words spilled slurred and sanguine from his lips, and she saw no God in his eyes.

Steel wool could not scrape the filth from her skin, those spots God missed when he tried.

Alice is pallid during the service that weekend. Jackie holds her hand in the pews and realizes how much it trembles.

“Tell me their name.”

Jackie sits on Alice’s bed, feathering through career brochures in social work.

Alice stares at her blank canvas, waiting for God to appear. “Whose?”

“The one who hurt you.”

Alice’s brushes clatter to the floor. Jackie’s arms become a confessional.

“God will give me justice,” is the mantra Alice clings to, fists clenched and tears streaming down her face.

Jackie’s arms tighten around her, strong and steady, the easel cradling her slashed canvas.

He still attends service, kneeling in prayer every Sunday. He, who desecrated her sanctuary and stained the white of her. He, who never even tried to seek her forgiveness. He speaks and prays and laughs in the face of God, his faith still pure while hers is poisoned.

Alice squeezes Jackie’s hand until her nails form crescents against the skin.

He winks at her from across the pews and turns her faith to fire.

Too much time passes.

Alice is accepted to one of the best art schools on the continent.

It is a thousand miles away and Jackie knows she cannot follow, not when so many children here are in ashes, their smoke only beginning to clear.

The night of graduation, after the parties are had and the gowns are hung, Jackie wakes Alice with a twilight-hour phone call.

“I have something for you,” she sounds like she’s smiling, “meet me at the church.”

The first thing Alice sees upon her arrival is the light painting Jackie’s face, yellow and orange flickering against a bystander to a flame.

“He comes here to drink when no one’s around," Jackie starts, "and the doors lock from the outside."

Blood rushes to Alice’s head and makes her heart beat in her ears, louder than the sound of crackling wood and crumbling foundation filling the night air. A thousand thoughts fly through her head, but not one of them makes her feel terror. God would give her justice, but was this justice?

“Are you God?”

“If there is a God, I'm not her.”

“I don't think you believe that for a second.”

“I didn't give you justice. I just expedited the trial.”

Jackie’s expression is peaceful, too peaceful, her laughter like a gavel in the quiet. The familiarity in her tone is the brushstroke which completes the portrait of the scene.

Alice continues staring into the fire. “You were hurt like I was, weren’t you?”

"Yeah," and Jackie smiles with too many teeth, “I burned him down, too.”

There are sirens in the distance.

Alice’s hands shake, but Jackie keeps them steady.

Jackie cups Alice’s cheek in her hand, thumb drifting over the skin where God had kissed her with a map of the universe.

There is firelight in her eyes, and she is beautiful.


End file.
